Bido is making a couple smart changes to its auction platform in an upcoming release.

First, Bido will start offering multiple auctions per day. It’s unclear how these will take place, but it could be several at the same time or one per hour (or half hour) throughout the day.

Second, expert users will now be able to vote on which domain names will be auctioned off. This is a great way to use crowd sourcing to figure out which domains have the most potential. Because the voting will be limited to registered users who have applied to be experts, it should prevent much of the gaming that could take place if anyone could vote on the domains to be auctioned.

Both of these changes are necessary and beneficial. Multiple auctions per day means that more people will get their domains into the auction and Bido will make more money. The voting mechanism will result in better domains being selected and relieve a big headache for Bido staff (not to mention deflecting criticism of domain selection).

Celebrities win domain names through arbitration.

As a follow up to Domain Name Wire’s earlier stories, both Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz have won their respective domain names through arbitration proceedings.

Actor and comedian Jim Carrey filed his case in April with World Intellectual Property Organization to get the domain name JimCarrey.com. According to Compete.com, JimCarrey.com gets a few hundred unique visitors per month.

Actress Cameron Diaz filed a case with National Arbitration Forum in April to get CameronDiaz.com.

Carrey and Diaz join several other celebrities to pick up their domain names through arbitration lately. Jay Leno has filed to get several domain names (some of which were handed over already), Alien Star Sigourney Weaver won SigourneyWeaver.com, and the owner of ElizabethTaylor.com gave Elizabeth Taylor the domain name after she filed a complaint.

Latona will add needed spark to domain conference franchise.

TRAFFIC was the first big domain name industry conference. It was also the first to do many innovative things, such as offer a compelling live domain auction. But lately its star has faded. Attendance is down, and don’t just blame the economy. When I asked people before the last TRAFFIC if they were going, a common response was “It’s not relevant anymore”. They blamed lackluster programming as a big fault. As TRAFFIC sputtered, other domain conferences such as Oversee.net’s DomainFest rose to stardom.

But adding Rick Latona to the bill is sure to add a spark. Here are 5 things Latona, Rick Schwartz, and Howard Neu can do to improve TRAFFIC, two of which have already been done.

1. Make it inclusive – Invitations? Banning people from attending? Latona has already said that’s out the window. It was immature and cast a negative light on the industry. Good riddance.

2. Lower the price – Again, Latona has already said this will happen. The irony here is that Schwartz has been opposed to dropping the price in the past because he felt the quality of attendee would drop. Latona has turned this on its head, saying that small time players can become big ones later. It’s a 180 from the old line of thinking.

3. Improve programming – Publish the agenda well ahead of time, get new speakers, and think up fresh panel topics. It sounds like next year’s shows will feature more themed topics. Much like the ccTLDs conference, new topics means learning something.

4. Don’t oversell it – This will be hard given that both Schwartz and Latona are the consummate salesmen. They’re both good at it, too. But you can only read “this is the most important conference ever” so many times before you start to call B.S.

5. Play nice – It puts a black mark on our industry when competitors try to boost their own position to the detriment of the industry. Don’t be scared of other conferences and when they take place. Work with them to pick the best time for all conferences to be held. Compete by providing a superior product, not by trying to shove our your competition with timing and dates.

A few domain news updates.

Here are a few domain news updates for Thursday evening.

Andrew Allemann on Bido – join me on Bido.com tomorrow at 1 PM EDT. I’ll be the guest in the chatroom as we auction off Basketballs.info.

Free domains for Fathers’ Day – Webfusion is giving away free .info domain names all weekend. The company will give away as many as 3,000 domain names. If you miss the freebies don’t worry — the company is charging just $.88 for .info through the end of the month.

.Pro wants lower fees – Registry Services Corporation (dba RegistryPro), which runs the .pro top level domain name, is requesting (pdf) that ICANN lower its annual fees. RegistryPro has been paying about $122,000 per year and wants to lower that to just $10,000 a year. The registry would also pay $.20 per domain registration or renewal once its registrations hit 50,000. Right now there are about 36,000 .pro domains registered.

Companies loses second attempt to acquire domain name GetMore.com through domain arbitration.

I was wrong.

In January of this year I wrote an article “Domain Arbitration Doesn’t ‘Get More’ Crazy Than This” about a UDRP case for the domain GetMore.com.

The title of the article was wrong, because this case just became even more crazy. The complainant, which lost the case, refiled a case with World Intellectual Property Organization claiming that it has acquired new evidence against the respondent. In other words, it attempted to try the respondent for the same alleged crime twice.

There was no crime to begin with. A Danish company using GetMore.dk realized it also needed the .com and tried to swipe it from the owner via arbitration because the owner was asking “too much”. It failed.

The complainant failed in its second attempt, too. The arbitrator decided that the complainant hadn’t introduced any evidence in its second attempt that it could not have acquired before its first filing. (The complainant has unlimited time to gather evidence before filing a case, even though the respondent has only a short window.)

The additional evidence amounted to a prior blog post by the respondent saying he made money from domain names, and some sort of alleged connection between the respondent and a parking service. The arbitrator pointed out that this was immaterial as stated and should have been included in the original complaint.

The arbitrator also said that if cases like this were allowed to proceed, then the UDRP system would be flooded with refiled cases. This would also require domain owners to spend lots of money defending cases over and over.

But here’s the rub: even though the arbitrator decided not to hear this case again, the domain owner still had to respond. I propose that refiled cases are first sent to an arbitrator that decides if they should be reheard before sending the complaint to the respondent.